Editorial: Drop out of the Electoral College

Thursday

Jun 21, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 21, 2007 at 9:19 PM

It's time to fix a mistake made 220 years ago that by some historical accounts, was never intended to last as long as it did anyway. In the most important election in the world, everybody's vote should count the same.

By The Patriot Ledger

Mark Twain once famously said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." The same can be said about that archaic relic in American elections called the Electoral College. But there is a move underway to change that system so the winner of the popular vote will be the winner of the election - a simple and logical step if we ever heard one - and we urge Massachusetts lawmakers to support the measure.

There have been movements before to amend the Constitution and abolish the system of electors but for whatever reason - low priority, no sense of urgency, the Electoral College purportedly levels the playing field for small states - the effort has never made headway.

But a group called National Popular Vote is urging legislatures across the country to join an interstate compact that would pledge their electors to the candidate who gets the most votes in the country. Supporters are looking to create a compact where states who join in agree to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

So far Maryland is the only state to enact the measure but the law does not take effect there, nor would it here or in other states that pass the bill, until enough states who have a total equal or greater than 270 electoral votes - the majority need to win election - enact the law.

Some may view this as a constitutional end-run around the stifling and labor-intensive amendment process - and it is. But it is also a move that is clearly within constitutional boundaries.

Article Two of the Constitution outlines the makeup and purpose of the electors but leaves to each state how those electors are selected and how the votes are distributed.

The two major parties in Massachusetts and most other states select the electoral College members while a few states have candidates on the ballots pledged to parties or third-party candidates. All states except Maine and Nebraska have winner-take-all systems; those two cast elector ballots by congressional district. Maine changed its approach in 1972 and Nebraska followed in 1991, so the argument that this is the system the Founding Fathers wrote in stone is moot.

That, then, belies one fallacy of the electoral system.

The second is it makes players out of small states so their importance is not nullified in presidential politics. Rubbish.

The electoral system was part of a compromise with southern states that had a smaller voting population but a huge number of slaves, who clearly couldn't vote. Initially, the Constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for representation purposes and the electoral vote, which is based on congressional districts plus the two Senate seats, put the slave-owning states on equal footing with their more populated northern brethren.

And all one has to do these days is look at the red and blue maps to realize the seven smallest states, with three electoral votes each - Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming - have not been players in presidential elections in some time regardless of their political leanings.

That is also the biggest failure of the electoral system. It sets up the potential for the loser of the popular vote to be able to manipulate the election by winning the electoral college.

Candidates and their strategists identify so-called battleground states and then dump all their resources into those states in an effort to corral the electoral votes. In 2004, according to one analysis, 92 percent of campaign events were held in 13 battleground states. Those states also received nearly 97 percent of the campaigns' advertising dollars in the last month before the election.

Most recently, New York, California and Texas have been marginalized because of predictable blue and red voting patterns. Here in Massachusetts, what could a GOP contender gain by campaigning in the Bay State and what is the incentive for a Democratic candidate to take time out for a visit? Under the current system, does it matter whether you win or lose by 51 percent to 49 percent or 65 to 35? It would under one person-one vote.

Backers of the proposal cite four presidential elections in history - 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 - where the candidate with the highest vote total lost. Some might argue the early votes are somewhat skewed because of corruption, the fact not all candidates were on every state's ballot, partisan politics, etc. Their arguments are valid.

But there can be no arguing that the 2000 election turned on the disputed Florida returns. And if just 60,000 votes in Ohio had switched sides in 2004 or 22,000 votes in four smaller states went the other way, John Kerry would have been elected over George W. Bush despite getting some 3.5 million less votes nationally.

It's time to fix a mistake made 220 years ago that by some historical accounts, was never intended to last as long as it did anyway. In the most important election in the world, everybody's vote should count the same.